Canada To Curtail Welfare Benefits

TORONTO -- Canada has tightened its rules for unemployment insurance, a move that may foreshadow a widening erosion of one of the industrial world`s most generous Social Security systems.

Employment and Immigration Minister Barbara MacDougall said that the government would pare its spending on unemployment insurance by about 10 percent next year by extending the minimum period of work required to qualify for benefits, reducing the duration of benefits and making it tougher to claim payments for people who leave their jobs without cause.

MacDougall`s announcement on Tuesday came a day after Finance Minister Michael Wilson hinted strongly that the federal budget to be presented on April 27 would entail public belt-tightening.

Warning that the government`s debt of 320 billion Canadian dollars had become an ``overarching problem,`` Wilson told a retailers` convention in Toronto that in a pursuit of popularity, ``too often governments said yes to this new program or that new tax concession when they should have said no.

``We have been been living on borrowed money -- money borrowed from our children`s future,`` Wilson said.

``The bills are coming due today. Action is needed now.``

The budget, the first since Prime Minister Brian Mulroney`s Conservatives were returned to office last November, is expected to be the toughest in many years, combining spending cuts across a broad front with substantial tax increases.

Private sector economists predict that the cuts will affect the military, foreign aid and a wide range of subsidies, including those on passenger rail travel, regional industrial development and public broadcasting.

With Tuesday`s announcement on unemployment insurance, the government also appears to be readying Canadians for some trimming of the Social Security system, hitherto considered an inviolate part of this nation`s political and social structure.